xCloud Yarnell and Anthem
It’s no secret that Microsoft is working on a new cloud streaming service called xCloud. The platform will be released into public beta later this year and for those willing to dig around in the weeds, you can find evidence of their progress.
In December of 2018, I mentioned that Anthem was the code name of the first generation of xCloud and today, we are starting to see evidence of that information. And by today, I mean actually back in June. A user on Twitter posted a couple of code names related to xCloud and here is what I know about the differences between the offerings; nothing too crazy but a minor revision is the only difference.
ServerHardwareType: ANTHEM / YARNELL #protobuf #srtp #xcloud pic.twitter.com/hsGAkabGcS
— e99 (@tuxuser360) June 19, 2019
Anthem is what Microsoft calls the Cloud SKU 1 and Yarnell is Cloud SKU 2. Yarnell is an upgrade over Anthem but I don’t think it’s the Scarlett upgrade as many were speculating. I believe it’s much smaller and is a modest upgrade of the storage of the boards from EMMC to M.2. The other update may be improved networking performance with the addition of 10 GBe NIC support as well which is often required in server-level infrastructure.
This is a minor bit of information but for those who are often curious about the differences in Microsoft’s internal projects, this should help shed a bit of light about what the company is doing with its xCloud platform.